For all these various acts the Examiner was prosecuted, with various fortunes; but in the last case it was fined 1,000l., and its editor and publisher, the brothers Leigh and John Hunt, were sentenced to two years' imprisonment. The Examiner was no extravagant or violent paper; its writing was pretty nearly of the standard that would be required now for style, tone, and sentiment; but what would now be a matter of course in cultivated style, elevated tone, and independent sentiment, was then supposed to be not open to writers unprotected by privilege of Parliament. Not that the paper stood alone. Other writers, both in town and country, vied with it in independence; it excelled chiefly, perhaps, in the literary finish which Leigh Hunt imparted to journalism; but it was the more conspicuous for that finish. Its boldness won it high esteem. Offers came from "distinguished" quarters, on the one side, to bribe its silence for the Royal Horse Guards and its peccadilloes; on the other, to supply the proprietors with subscription, support, and retaliatory evidence. The Examiner equally declined all encroachments on its complete independence, which was carried to a pitch of exclusiveness. This conduct told. The journal was thought dangerous to the régime—it was prosecuted, and its success was only the greater. The Court ceased to be what it had been, and the political system changed: the press of England became generally what the Examiner was.
The Reflector was a quarterly journal, based on the Examiner and its corps. Its more literary portion in its turn laid the basis for the Indicator, in which Leigh Hunt designed, with due deference, to revive the essays of the old Spectator and Tatler. The grand distinction was, that in lieu of mere literary recreation, like the illustrious work of Addison, Steele, and Swift, it more directly proposed to indicate the sources of pleasurable association and æsthetical improvement. In the Reflector, the Indicator, Tatler, and subsequent works of the same class, Leigh Hunt was assisted by Lamb, Barnes [afterwards editor of the Times], Aikin, Mitchell [Aristophanes], Keats, Shelley, Hazlitt, and Egerton Webbe,—the last cut short in a career rendered certain by his accomplishments, his music, his wit, and his extraordinary command of language as an instrument of thought. As in Robin Hood's band, each man could beat his master at some one art, or perhaps more; but none excelled him in telling short stories, with a simplicity, a pathos, and a force that had their prototype less in the tales of Steele and Addison, than in the romantic poets of Italy. Few essayists have equalled, or approached, Leigh Hunt in the combined versatility, invention, and finish of his miscellaneous prose writings; and few, indeed, have brought such varied sympathies to call forth the sympathies of the reader—and always to good purpose,—in favour of kindness, of reflection, of natural pleasures, of culture, and of using the available resources of life. He used to boast that the Indicator laid the foundation for the "two-*penny trash" which assumed a more practical and widely popular form under Charles Knight's enterprise. It has had a host of imitators, but is still special, and keeps its place in the library.
